Ministry of Health in collaboration with WHO Maldives has conducted the first national symposium on patient safety with participation from health care professionals from different disciplines across the nation.
The symposium started on 23 October 2022 and the healthcare professionals in attendance included doctors, nurses, lab technologists, community health workers and health service discipline lecturers. The theme for this year patient safety day is “medication without harm” and the theme for the symposium was “patient safety starts with me”.
This symposium was conducted hybrid with a total of 75 in person and more than 100 online participation. The in-person session included 2 participants from each atoll, including Male’ Atoll and 3 to 7 participants from hospitals within Greater Male Area. The online participants were from health centers across the country. The opportunity was given to all island health centers to participate online in the symposium.
The symposium covered patient safety, safe medication, medication without harm, infection prevention and control, hospital acquired infection surveillance, healthcare waste management, equipment safety, collaborative pharmaceutical care for patient safety, safe surgical checklist, incorporation of Infection prevention and control in teaching curriculum, patient safety incident reporting and learning systems, and training on undertaking point-of-care quality improvement initiatives, The symposium gave participants opportunity to discuss cases review them with experts and identify learning and practice change.
While all the participants were awarded participation certificates, the infection control and prevention with hospital acquired infection surveillance component started with a pre-test and at the end of 2 day session, participants were given a post-test and those who reached a post-test mark above 80% were awarded competency certificates. Similarly, the point of care quality improvement training was also conducted in a similar manner and those participants who received a post-test mark above 80% were awarded competency certificates. Further, a total of 30 quality improvement projects were designed and presented to the participants with the assistance of facilitators. The projects that are successfully implemented will get the opportunity to be published in an international journal,
Opportunity to showcase quality improvement projects by different hospitals were given as experience sharing. A total of 12 local experts and 21 foreign experts facilitated the symposium.
The symposium concluded on 27 October 2022. In addition to MoH and WHO, the point of care training was conducted in collaboration with National Quality of Care Network India.
